Scaling Your Brokerage/Team with Parker Pemberton

Anthony Lamacchia: Hey, everybody. I’m excited to be here with my friend Parker Pemberton from Minnesota, who is absolutely crushing it in real estate, building an awesome team, and doing great things, buddy.

Parker Pemberton: What’s up, Anthony? Thanks for having me into the office. Yes, I appreciate the intro. Where do you want to take it?

Anthony: I want to talk about your team. We met briefly in 2017 in Dana Point, California. I wish we were there right now, but that’s beside the point. At that time, you were a single agent selling maybe 100 homes a year?

Parker: Yes, we were right around 100. 30 million or so.

Anthony: At that time?

Parker: Yes.

Anthony: Now, you came to my first Crush It In Real Estate coaching event, like team leader, broker owner, coaching event. What do we call it? We call it our growth and playbook event two summers ago, right now. At that time, you were doing how much business?

Parker: 2023, we closed 700 transactions. It’s right around 200 million in production.

Anthony: This year, you’re going to close?

Parker: This year, we’ll close 2,400 transactions. It should be good for just shy of 900 million in production. It’s weird to even say that, to be honest.

Anthony: What’s amazing is your execution. There’s a lot of people that came to that event last year and the year before, and a lot of great people, a lot of people that added improvements to your business, but you’re the best executor I’ve seen. That’s usually me. I’m known to be a good executor. I make things happen, but you are right there with me, buddy. I’m so happy about it and the scale that you’re adding. Let’s go back in the time machine to when you started the team, and then some of the adjustments that you’ve made that we should talk about in front of everyone. We can leave out some things, but when you started the team, how did you start? Buyer’s agent, what?

Parker: I think the important thing to mention first is that from day one, I’ve been really curious about this business in general and how to continuously grow. From day one, it’s been this progression of self-development and also business growth, and trying to see literally what comes around the next corner and who can I get access to and which rooms can I get into. From the early days, we were just talking about this, it was the Tom Ferry Network.

Anthony: Yes, Tom does a great job.

Parker: I think third month in real estate, I jumped into the Tom Ferry Network, which I don’t think is a normal thing for most solo agents. That led me into many great relationships and friendships, and great coaches that helped me along the way. When we got introduced to each other, I was coming out here to look at what does that next level look like. It’s rare to actually have somebody like you, Anthony, to actually run an event like that. Most people are closed off. They don’t want people to come into their rooms. For somebody that is that far ahead to share what you guys are doing is absolutely invaluable.

Anthony: I just felt that you’re a team leader. I went from single agent to small team to big team to power team to brokerage model. I converted to a brokerage model 2015 to 2017. There are very specific things that I did, give the agents more autonomy, allow for more generosity as they grow up, allow them to get credit in the MLS, a lot of specific things that we had talked about. I figured, why not share it? There were other people that reached out and pushed me on the event. Dan Baer is a friend out in San Diego. Dan pushed me on it as well as some others, Gory and Dhiraj, and Greg Hamre.

Parker: It was about 20 people or so that first year.

Anthony: The first year, yes. Then last year, we had about 15. We didn’t do it this year. We might do something specific to acquisitions, which by the way, can we talk about that?

Parker: Absolutely.

Anthony: You’re going through a team acquisition right now.

Parker: We are, yes.

Anthony: Let’s talk about it.

Parker: First, at Pemberton Homes, we got ourselves to 80, 90 agents through just one-on-one, single-agent growth.

Anthony: Recruiting.

Parker: Yes, recruiting. What you realize is that you’re bringing on the right people, and you’re creating the culture of the company. When you really want to start growing, and what I learned from you guys is that it’s called chunky growth. You go and find, whether it’s a team of 3 or a team of 20, or it’s a brokerage of 3 or a brokerage of 200, like Anthony’s bringing on, it’s chunky growth which adds to your company. When I started to learn about that, my whole world was flipped upside down back in 2023. We’ve completed seven of those. We’re working on an eighth right now.

Anthony: Yes, teams.

Parker: Yes, team merger.

Anthony: You’re targeting other teams within EXP or outside companies or both?

Parker: I’m working on all of them. Anybody that would fit our model that sees a mutual benefit of partnering up, I think right now is maybe the most opportune time to be doing these sorts of mergers and acquisitions. I saw the opportunity, and I just doubled down on it. It’s taken our business completely a different direction.

Anthony: That’s how you can grow in chunks. I have to credit Tim. We had a guy here for a few years who was helping us with acquisitions and things. He used to call it chunky growth. I passed that on to you. Jet Black’s recruiting model helps. We both use it more than helps. It works. We’ve both used it over the years. I know you coach with John as well.

Parker: Yes, absolutely. He’s a huge influence in my life.

Anthony: Yes, no doubt. John’s terrific. I got on his coaching in November of ’17. We had 93 agents. Today we have 760. We went 93 to 500 in about probably five years. Then we made some changes in the last couple of years, acquired 11 companies, but we stopped taking on brand new agents. That slowed down our agent count, but our productivity per agent has gone up. That certainly helped us a lot. Now, let’s talk about marketing and branding. You’re branding the group, the team, your company as Pemberton Homes.

Parker: Correct. Yes.

Anthony: Smart. This guy pays attention, takes notes. I’m not going to show his notes. He implements, folks, implements. That is a big problem that so many realtors have, so many team leaders have, so many broker owners have, is you actually have to go back and try things and fail at things. Have you failed at some things?

Parker: Absolutely.

Anthony: Have you made some mistakes? Have you called me and said, “Dude, this isn’t working like I thought or like you explained?” We discuss it, and you improve it. That’s business. He’s not scared. You can’t be scared, but go ahead, explain that. Pemberton Homes, not Pemberton Homes team.

Parker: Personally, I just feel like we’re in business to create a legacy, and time’s ticking. Every day that we waste is a wasted opportunity to grow.

Anthony: So funny. We’re like brothers from another mother or something. I always say every hour that goes by, you’ll never see that hour again as long as you live.

Parker: The wildest thing at this point is that it’s really not even about the money anymore. It’s almost like we’re playing a sport. We’re just always trying to get better. It’s a game. We’re trying to help everyone around us win. That’s fun. When everybody gets to win around you, that’s extremely motivated and fun. For me, I just don’t see any reason to not try our absolute hardest and try to get to that next level. The implementation, maybe it comes from my golf background, maybe it comes from just valuing people ahead of me, showing me what’s around that next corner or two. It’s all of that combined.

Anthony: You’re just doing it. The team name, though, I want to talk about that for a minute.

Parker: You get to a certain point in your growth where– Every market’s different first, but you might get to 50, 60, 70, 80 agents, and all of a sudden, the marketplace looks at a team differently than what they look at a brokerage. When you’re branding a team, let’s just be honest, there are people out there that just simply don’t want to be on a team.

If you want to continue to grow, and you want to continue to expand into demographics that would normally not want to be on a team, you have to change the marketing around that. When we went to Pemberton Homes, it was a rebrand, and I think we did it late 2023. We went from 80 agents to today, we have 182, and I believe we’re onboarding 6 as we’re talking right now.

Anthony: 185 agents right now, and then you’re going to close about $900 million this year.

Parker: Right there, yes.

Anthony: Right around there?

Parker: Yes.

Anthony: What’s the future look like? What’s the plan?

Parker: Honestly, the future is it’s stay in the trench that we’re in right now, continue to do the things that we’re doing, don’t get distracted by outside influences. I feel like this marketplace right now that we’re in is just filled with distraction from top to bottom. For us, the three things we focus on, recruiting, retention of those great agents, and per-agent productivity, which encompasses the activities. It encompasses skillset and mastery. It encompasses all the things that around. If we can bring up, and Anthony, too, if you can bring up your per-agent productivity by one and a half sales or two sales, your production jumps. Those three things together is what we’re focusing on right now.

Anthony: I love it, buddy. I’m proud of you.

Parker: Thanks.

Anthony: Good job. Doing a great job. Happy to have you here. Speaking of when he mentioned being in rooms, there’s no official event going on right now, but he just called me, he said, “I want to visit.” I get those calls all the time. Most of the time, I tell the truth, “We’re too busy. We don’t have time for visitors.” This guy, we’re happy to have because he’s kicking ass.

Parker: Last thing I’ll say is that if you’re watching this, it truly does matter which rooms you get into and who you surround yourself with. If you’re not surrounding yourself with people that are above you and beyond you and that can mentor you and help you, you’re just going to be the average or the mean that you hang out with. Would love for somebody to come back to us a couple of years from now and say, “Hey, I remember that Parker and Anthony talked about this, and I got myself into this room, and my business grew.” Because that’s truly the story of my career.

Anthony: You’re absolutely right about that. I do the same thing. I always say half of being successful is just showing up. That’s something that I’ve done for years. You’ve got to show up, and then you have to implement. All right, folks. Thank you all. Thank you, Parker. Good luck. Happy home selling.

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